Tag: software performance testing

Last Wednesday the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) underwent an IT failure which withheld 600,000 payments from customer accounts. This occurs seven months after RBS was fined ₤56 million due to an IT Crash in 2012 that impeded customers from accessing their online accounts. The poor system performance has caused difficulties for customers and shock from the banking community.

During last week’s webinar on IT Transformation featuring Marc Cecere, vice president and principal analyst for Forrester Research, many questions presented by participants went unanswered due to time constraints. Because these questions are likely being asked by many in the IT arena, we asked Marc’s webinar co-host, Pete Pizzutillo of CAST to provide answers to the three most frequently asked questions.

I have been an East-Coaster all my life. I’ve lived, worked and even attended college in states that all lie East of the Mississippi. However, throughout my 18 years working in the technology business, my clients have been spread out around the U.S. and abroad. I’ve found myself doing phone calls before the sun rises and well after it has set. That’s just the way it is in this business.

Some among us may remember Earl Scheib who owned a chain of auto painting facilities; at least, that's what he called them. In actual fact, his shops were a national joke. In his TV commercials he would tell viewers, “I’ll paint any car for $99.95” and would promise one-day service. He did just that, but as the old saying goes, "You get what you pay for."

Last week’s admissions of bugs in newly released software by Apple and Google were just the latest reminders that the battle between bringing software products to market quickly and optimizing software quality is coming to a head in a year that has seen far more than its share of software outages, malfunctions and security breaches. Most of these problems have been the direct result of problems with the structural quality of software and have cost the companies hit by them a great deal both financially and in terms of reputation.

Human beings are an odd animal. We’re the only animal that experiences embarrassment over mistakes; some say we’re the only animal that realizes we make them. We also run a full gamut of emotions when we make mistakes – from frustration and self-deprecation to humor and acceptance.

On the night of his ship’s maiden and lone voyage, the skipper of the Titanic saw the top of an iceberg, swerved to avoid it, and in doing so piloted his ship’s hull directly into the monstrous portion of the iceberg that lied unseen beneath the surface of the ocean, tearing apart the “unsinkable” ship. Had he known what lied beneath the surface, his reaction likely would have been much different and could have yielded a very different, possibly positive result.

Recently, Gartner Analyst Andy Kyte made quite a stir when he published a report that brought to the forefront just how expensive the cost of software maintenance is becoming for the IT industry. As reported by Patrick Thibodeau in Computerworld, Kyte cited what he called IT Debt as already standing at $500 billion and fast on its way to surpassing $1 Trillion globally.

Very often when describing a concept, technique or any way of doing something, you hear people quip, “It’s not rocket science.” While normally this holds true for static analysis of business applications, the difference between the capabilities of the type of automated analysis and measurement offered by CAST versus manual structural analysis can make the former seem like rocket science.